Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many will recognize the title of this review as F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous reference to The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1995), to which Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have retorted, "Yes, they have more money."Greg Clark, it seems, is prepared to side with Fitzgerald; the rich are different from the rest of us.Clark argues that the rich possess a set of potentially inheritable traits-work ethic, ingenuity, education, and patience-that the poor do not, and the reason that England industrialized when it did (and why other nations did not) was simply the result of "good" genes.What is undeniable, and perhaps more in line with Fitzgerald's intention than Clark's, is that the set of social norms that govern the behavior of individuals varies not only from nation to nation but between different social classes within a nation as well.So the rich are different from the rest of us.The question remains however, if growth-promoting social norms of the wealthy classes come to dominate in some nations why did they not in others?As the title suggests, Farewell to Alms spans the economic history of man from roughly the beginning of the Neolithic revolution, when settled agricultural societies began, to the present, with an emphasis on the period leading up to the take-off that preceded modern economic growth.The text is divided into three sections, each addressing a specific question.The first is a detailed exploration of economic life under the Malthusian regime, the prehistoric period up to 1800.The second examines the period of modern economic growth, from the onset of the Industrial Revolution to the present day.The final, brief section discusses the causes and effects of the post-industrialization widening of global incomes.Clark's hypothesis is simple and straightforward, in keeping with the tone of this work which should be accessible to academics in a variety of disciplines, students at all levels, and non-academics alike.He proposes a tipping point theory 1 of evolutionary biology using a survival of the fittest argument: wealthy successful men produce more children that live to child-bearing age.He argues that, as a result, behaviors, such as greater work hours (diligence), higher savings rates (patience), higher literacy (the importance of education), and innovativeness (ingenuity) came to predominate over time in the nations which industrialized first, principally in England.In his view the transition from a predisposition of the wealthy class to societal norms for all classes was aided by the downward mobility of the children of the wealthy into the more common classes.The end of the eighteenth century, he suggests, is the tipping point for human economic advancement, the point at which these qualities became sufficiently prevalent in some nations as to have an overwhelming effect on living standards.Other nations, such as Japan and China, did not advance along the same trajectory despite evidence 1 A theory in which a critical point is reached beyond which change is irreversible.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".